Dante’s Inferno: Do Classic Poems Make Great Videogames?

While filmmakers are no stranger to literary adaptation, videogame designers have not leaped to translate the classic novels and poems into their medium. Jonathan Knight, executive producer of the coming Dante’s Inferno, thinks that’s a mistake. Developed by Visceral Games and published by Electronic Arts, the videogame is loosely based on the first part of Dante’s epic poem “The Divine Comedy” and follows a veteran of the Third Crusade as he fights to free his beloved Beatrice from the grips of Lucifer. The game got a big boost with a Super Bowl ad last night (you can see the clip below). Speakeasy asked Knight, who has an MFA in theater directing, about the new work and turning a classic work into a mainstream game:

Wall Street Journal: So why Dante?

I wanted to do something dark and I was interested in a game set in Hell. There have been games that deal with demons or mythological versions, but I was imagining something specific in the Christian vision of Hell as a place where sinners go. I was researching and Dante rises to the top as the guy who synthesized hundreds of years of thought about the Christian afterlife and codified the nine circles of Hell. He synthesized the medieval worldview and reading the poem, it jumped out at me.

Was there a specific part where you said “Man, we have to do this”?

When I started seeing maps with the woods of the suicides and mud valley of the gluttons and the rivers all leading to the frozen lakes. It totally looks like a level design map from a videogame. He’s so detailed and specific about the way he describes it. It was things like “we descended the cliff and walked down to the base and got on a centaur and crossed it.”

What are the similarities between designing good videogame levels and Dante’s maps?

He often has a guardian and that to me feels like a boss. It could be a giant or epic character who prevents you from making progress and you have to defeat this giant monster. There’s King Minos at the end of Limbo, for example. In that sense, he’s sort of laying out various challenges.

You mentioned Shakespeare as one of your interests during your MFA. What do you think he would have been like as a game designer?

Shakespeare would have been on the forefront. He was an innovator and not just a great story-teller. Arguably, he’s more of a medium innovator. He borrowed heavily. “Hamlet” is a complete rip-off of a story on the prince of Denmark. Some people think he lifted it from a work that actually came between the two stories.

He was such a master at harnessing the new. For him, the new medium was open air theater on the south side of the Thames. He solidified a big portion of the English language with his plays much like Dante did with Italian vernacular.

Films have been pulling material from literature for a long time, but you’ve received some flak for your adaptation. Do you think videogames get a bum deal?

We’re definitely taking the arrows in the back. In the hardcore specialty gaming press, they’re trying to protect original stories and they think we shouldn’t be borrowing. But there’s room for both. Large audiences want this thing over time and there’s no reason we shouldn’t leverage some of these classic writers.

Ultimately, what we’re hearing is that game project is getting people interested in the poem. I read the comments on our Facebook page and people are saying things like this project has gotten me interested in Dante or my professor mentioned that “Inferno’s” being turned into a videogame.

Is there anything that you would have liked to include from the poem, but didn’t work out?

I would have liked to include a lot more back stories about some of the minor characters. Like in Treachery, he stumbles across Count Ugolino who’s trapped in the ice. He’s buried in eternity eating the head of his archenemy [Archbishop Ruggieri] and it’s really arresting stuff. There’s speculation too that he had to devour his own children.

But we can’t tell players to stop and listen someone tell a story. That’s not what games are about. A lot of the great language that comes from the story is definitely lost on the game. That’s the nature of saying it’s not literature. At the end of the day, it’s a loose videogame version of the literature, but not a replacement. It’s not like you can play the game and you can do a book report.

Wow. That Ugolino story is crazy. It’s funny that people accuse videogames of being too violent.

It’s amazing that the poem is so violent and shocking and horrific. [Laughs] That was 700 years ago.

About Speakeasy

Speakeasy is a blog covering media, entertainment, celebrity and the arts. The publication is produced by Barbara Chai and Jonathan Welsh with contributions from the Wall Street Journal staff and others. Write to us at speakeasy@wsj.com or follow us on Twitter at @WSJSpeakeasy or individually @barbarachai.